Caching AJAX Results in JavaScript

AJAX is an awesome tool. AJAX requests are usually faster than regular page loads and allow for a wealth of dynamism within a page. Unfortunately many people do not properly cache request information when they can. Let me show you how I cache AJAX requests — it’s super easy!

My example will use my TwitterGitter plugin to grab a user’s tweets. Once we have the user’s tweet information, we pull it from cache instead of making a duplicate AJAX request.
//our cache object
var cache = {};
var formatTweets(info) {
//formats tweets, does whatever you want with the tweet information
};

//event
$('myForm').addEvent('submit',function() {
var handle = $('handle').value; //davidwalshblog, for example
var cacheHandle = handle.toLowerCase();
if(cache[cacheHandle]) {
formatTweets(cache[cacheHandle]);
}
else {
//gitter
var myTwitterGitter = new TwitterGitter(handle,{
count: 10,
onComplete: function(tweets,user) {
cache[cacheHandle] = tweets;
formatTweets(tweets);
}
}).retrieve();
}
});